Internet home of Evan May, author of The King in Darkness

Thing 1 and Thing 2

A couple of things from the last little while working on the project. The first is that apparently the principle of inertia applies to writing as well. What I mean is that on days (and there haven’t been that many) when I absolutely do not feel like writing, but make myself do it anyway (avoiding internet scolding) there is a tipping point past which the feeling that I don’t want to write goes away and things start to move along just fine. It’s overcoming that relatively brief stage of not wanting to do it that is the hard part.

I guess this may always have been true, which makes me wish I had been a little less laissez-faire about things in days gone by. On the other hand though, I think it may be that my experiences spending summer days with the microfilm machine or reading articles all day every day to get ready for a seminar or supervision may have given me a level of persistence I didn’t have before.

Either way, it’s kind of a nice thing to have figured out, now, because now when I don’t feel like writing at all, at least in the back of my mind I know that if I drag those first few sentences out of me, eventually things will improve.

Thing #2 is kind of a happy accident. One of my Eager Volunteers let me know that a scene in the second chunk I sent out that I thought had problems did indeed have those problems. So that’s mostly not good news, although at least I was right about the problems! The good part is that when I sat down to go about fixing it I wrote some stuff that at least for now I feel is pretty good. (We’ll see if Statler and Waldorf get to work on it, but for now they’re quiet.) The scene still isn’t fixed, of course, but I wrote some stuff that I wouldn’t have if not for it being screwed up in the first place, so overall, I will take it.